Britons are born with heads facing backwards

Life in a country where there is no time like the present

In Great Britain nostalgia has never been out of fashion. For a child of the 1990s, the notion that the Second World War is as distant from my birth as the 2040s seems an unlikely one. In the UK, we remain so obsessed with our last crowning glory that we tend to forget about the future as a nation. But on the rare occasions we do, we find ourselves on a journey back to the future to a destination like ‘Global Britain’. The same Global Britain that gazes deeply into our collective navel and turns anything of international concern into a provincial slanging match.

As for now, our preference is to live in a fairy tale ‘Great’ version of Diminished Britain. The third generation of unemployed relations that still dine out on the unlikely story that this plucky little country the size of Wyoming built an Empire upon which the sun never set. We won two World Wars and a World Cup. And in a divided country with little left to agree on, not least the legacy of Empire, this hat-trick over the Germans would almost certainly be the United Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s founding motto if we were to get rid of our suspiciously Germanic Royal Family:

Duae Bella Mundi et Uni Poculum Mundi. Doo dah. 

But as a recent convert to British republicanism perhaps I should stop employing the Royal We so liberally, for nostalgia is also an inherently conservative and personal pastime. Looking back on the 90s as an adult, I see a dial-up dream from the Matrix; affordable houses, cheap credit, Concorde, ‘Big Beasts’ in Westminster, pre-Silicon attention spans and a large British Army which maintained global stability with soft and hard power. Mundane at the time, it all seems improbable in retrospect. While the child that took all this for granted remembers the fun bits of the 90s like baggy football shirts, Gameboy Colours, penny sweets, five TV channels where less was more, 99 ice creams priced at an inflation-defying 99p, and the six week summer holidays that lasted for years. It was a glorious time. Everything worked and seemed to be getting better.

Even into the mid-noughties the feel-good factor continued to feel good. We were living out the prophecy of D-Ream and Tony Blair’s “New Dawn”. The optimism felt justified, with Britons more confident and less embarrassed. If you remember otherwise, listen to a vox pop from the past and you will realise what we have lost. The average Joe from the 1990s asked what they thought off the cuff sounds more erudite and convincing than almost any front-bench politician today. 

Londoners are asked about John Major’s Conservative Leadership victory in 1995, outside the Red Lion in Westminster. Back when a pint cost £1.67, or about £3.28 today. Yes, that is with inflation adjusted.

Or does it only look that way a few decades on? Despite how glorious it all was or seems in retrospect, the average Briton like myself grew up in the 90s with a feeling that something was missing. Put simply, we were still to being born with our heads facing backwards to glorious past we had never lived in.

But the further I look back, with that backwards facing head now balding, the more it would appear that nostalgia is in the water of these Isles.

I have been listening to David Mitchell’s Unruly in the past couple of weeks, where Mitchell takes a wry look at the history of England’s Kings and Queens. As he points out in a chapter on the Dark Ages; even before England existed as a country in the 9^th century, the few bits of writing that survive from this time are weighed down by a wistful melancholy for another glorious past. One such scribbling is the opening to a poem called ‘The Ruin’, which laments the crumbling relic of the Roman city of Bath:

Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,

walls gape, torn up, destroyed,
consumed by age. Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,

hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one reign after another; the high arch has now fallen.

Reference: Prof. Siân Echard, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia - ‘The Ruin’

This anonymous author was also born with a head facing backwards. Gazing back to a time when giants walked the land; when someone born here could be proud of home, living as they did upon the ‘high arch’ of civilisation. If Francis Fukuyama had visited Bath in the Dark Ages, in the unlikely event that he was literate, he could well have written a book titled The End of History without a hint of irony. As Mitchell reminds us in Unruly, the Roman’s flight from Britain really was catastrophic for British culture for next few hundred years.

Up until 2008, the average British consumer would have been forgiven for taking Mr Fukuyama and D-Ream literally; things could only get better now that history was over. All the unsightly poverty and tyranny of the developing world would soon be transformed into a carbon copy of the freedom-loving, credit-consuming West, to be partially but decisively delivered by benevolent British foreign policy. The affordable houses would stay affordable, ‘Big Beasts’ weren’t an endangered species, and the inflation on credit, 99s and penny sweets remained relatively flat. The arrow of time flew in the straight line of progress. And then it started to curve downwards from what turned out to be another crumbling ‘high arch’.

I am not claiming to be making a scientific examination the past thirty years of decline, or even a historical one. I was a child in the 1990s, which admittedly colours my judgement of that glorious decade somewhat. This is merely a summation of how it felt then and feels now. A meme could have done a much better and far wittier job with its extreme brevity. But as with the nostalgia junkies living in modern Britain, a meme starts from a position of detached irony in order to avoid looking silly. Perhaps this is why a vox pop outside the Red Lion with a pint costing north of £7 would be so different today; the drinkers now less sure of what they think in the internet age that never forgets. And although it certainly feels like things were better in the 90s, our default to nostalgia down the ages is a cautionary tale. For in a modern Britain that can also never forget about our former glories, we give new meaning to the phrase “there’s no time like the present.”